Hello again from Yarrow and You Therapeutic Bodywork! I am Heather Alison Cook, Licensed Massage Therapist and owner of Yarrow and You. I have been a bodyworker for over ten years and have been building my practice here in Aurora, Oregon, just outside of Canby, Oregon for a little over a year now. I offer Hot Stone Massage, Myofascial Bodywork, Cranial Sacral Therapy, Therapeutic Cupping, and Motor Vehicle Accident Care. I provide space for healing and pain relief to happen and that often requires taking that little bit of time just for you to come back into your body, decompress from the stressors of the world, and allow things to unglue, release, and leave your body. Everyone is unique and we work together so that the treatment is tailored to what you need at the moment. Take some You time! You can book here.
Shoes can affect your body
In the last blog, I introduced you to the idea that shoes might be affecting your body in ways you don’t really want. We learned how shoes that have a heel on them are like walking downhill every day. And how walking downhill is actually a good thing, unless, however, you never let your body do the service of walking back up that darned hill! We learned that if you do in fact wear heels (which most of us do and have for most of our lives because almost all shoes have more than a zero-degree incline to them) our body has adapted to this. We learned that anything (like wearing heeled shoes every day of our lives) that we do with our body in repetitive ways can affect how our body moves or doesn’t move. Certain muscles, like the calves and hamstrings, have shortened perhaps, if we’ve done a lot of sitting or shoe-wearing, which most of us in Western culture have… And we learned how doing corrective exercises, changing daily habits, along with getting regular myofascial bodywork can turn ailments and/or pain around and get you moving in a more aligned way. Katy Bowman at Nutritious Movement is a biomechanist with whom I had trained and I recommend visiting her site to find the corrective exercises your body might need. I also mentioned Anyas Reviews which is a great resource for finding shoes that can keep your feet and body healthy and aligned.
Shoes can shift body parts out of alignment
Okay now on to discussing more issues with shoes! I know, I know you don’t really want to know that there might be more issues with shoes. But someone’s got to tell you, so why not the person who works on your body? Alright, so now we might now understand how that heel, even though it may be small, contributes to shortened muscles and shifting parts of the body out of alignment. Now we will look at the other 3 components of a shoe; the toe box, the flexibility of the sole, and whether it stays onto your foot(i.e. flip flops) and how these can change how your body functions.
Toe box: this is the area where your toes are! If you stand on a piece of paper barefoot and have a friend trace the outline of your foot you can get a good idea of how much room your foot and toes need. HOWEVER, most of our toes have been unnaturally squished together and aren’t spaced out as they would be had we been running around barefoot for our entire life. So, stand barefoot again and spread your toes out as wide as you can. Redraw the outline. Did the outline of your foot, especially up at the toes change? Now, with the newly drawn outline, place your shoe on top to get an idea if your foot/toes fit is fitting inside of the shoe without restraint. Sometimes this is easy to see sometimes the bulk of the shoe is misleading. If your shoe is smaller than your toe spread, it means your toes aren’t being allowed to be their full beautiful selves! They are meant to spread! You can even put your actual shoe on and try to spread your toes, can you? One note on this- even if you try to spread your toes all the way out, they might not actually have the ability to spread all the way out at this time. Repetitive small-toe-box-shoe-wearing has conditioned our toes to NOT spread out while we walk and they might have lost their freedom to fully express who they are! So we need to do some corrective exercises to get our toe spread back to healthy positioning. Why, you ask? Toes are super duper important in helping us keep our balance. Most of our weight/skeleton, legs, pelvis, ribcage, and head should be aligned in such a way with most of the weight over our heel bones, not on the smaller bones of the forefoot. Go ahead and stand barefoot right now. Shift your weight back and forth from your heels to the balls of your feet/toes a few times then stop. Now settle into your familiar standing position. Notice where you like to hang out. Do you like to be forward a little? Or are you pretty balanced from the front to the back of the foot? Can you lift and wiggle your toes? Again, your toes might not have the ability to lift and wiggle at this time due to conditioning of both wearing shoes with a small toe box and wearing shoes with a heel, but having your weight on the front/balls of your feet does prevent the toes from being lifted. It’s like you are gripping the ground with your toes. Now shift your weight back over your heels. See if you can now lift your toes. If you can, then it means you may have a habit of standing more on the front/balls of your feet. This is correctable! Start stretching your calves out, rolling the bottom of your feet with a yoga therapy ball, and try to get into a zero-drop shoe and be mindful to shift your weight back over your heels so that your toes are liftable. There are other leg and hip strengthening exercises too that help this happen but becoming mindful of where you tend to wear your weight is the first step (no pun intended) in changing this! Look at Nutritious Movement for more exercises. If you shift your weight back onto the heels and still aren’t able to lift or wiggle your toes, then you also have some toe work to do. We want our toes to be liftable, to spread out, and help us balance. They are also there to notify our foot, ankle, leg, and brain to help us navigate the terrain upon which we are walking, running, etc. Toe spreaders are little silicone spacers you can start to wear as you begin to correct some of your foot issues. Spread those toes! Super pointy dress shoes are in fashion right now; I just saw a black leather pair on someone today at the coffee shop. So darned cute and stylish! But ouch! How do your toes fit in there? Wearing shoes that have a narrow toe box can also lead to bunions and other ailments as our toes are ideally meant to point straight ahead as we step.
Joints are sort of stuck together…
A flexible sole: this is what the bottom of your foot is resting on. How flexible is it? Our foot has 33 joints and 26 bones! And we want ALL of those joints to articulate and move. For most of us, most of those joints are sort of stuck together instead and move as one big clump from the ankle. Imagine being barefoot your whole life and walking in a forest. Your foot would land on tree roots and small rocks, tufts of grass, and depressions in the ground. Those 33 joints would be articulating/moving to allow for you to walk and stay upright without turning or twisting your ankle. Now picture a ski boot. Put the ski boot on in your mind’s eye. If you ever actually had a ski boot on, you will know that it essentially prevents your foot and ankle from moving too much. The boot is very rigid and does not flex. Ever tried walking in ski boots? It weird. The rest of your body has to do all kinds of things to complete the task. On a smaller scale repetitively wearing thick, overly built shoes like certain clogs, workboots, and hiking boots keeps your bones and feet immobile and forces other parts of your part to move in a wonky way. The ankle and lower leg can stiffen or lose joint mobility and this can then affect the knee, hip, pelvis, ribcage, and neck; the whole body. What is happening at your feet has a whole-body effect. Use it or lose it is the body’s mantra! Now walk over to your shoe collection and pick up some of your shoes. Can you easily bend your shoes? Do they flex easily? Or are they rigid and inflexible? Getting into a shoe that has a flexible sole along with doing some corrective exercises (using yoga therapy balls is great for this) to get those sticky joints back to moving will save the rest of your body from working the double shift and being cranky. Imagine if you always had to do extra work because the guy in front of you didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t do his own. You’d be cranky too!
Your toes scrunch up and grip the shoe…
4th component of a shoe: Does your shoe stay on your foot? Picture flip-flops! Our favorite, easy shoe. Oh no! Is she going to tell me to get rid of my flip-flops too? Well. Yes. (But you can adapt them!) Okay what is wrong with flip flops, you ask? They allow our toes to spread, right? Check. They usually have a flexible soles. Check. And they usually have a zero drop (but not always). Check. So they mostly fit the description of a healthy shoe. Yes, they do, but wait for it…mostly, with one seemingly benign issue. Gripping. To keep those flip flops or clogs on your feet, your toes scrunch up and grip the shoe so it doesn’t fall off. Every. Time. You. Step. That is a lot of gripping. This is like taking your toe-scrunching muscles in your toes, feet, and front of the shin to the gym every day, not days off. You super-size the amount of work they would normally be doing with a shoe that just stays on your foot. It might not seem like that is happening because we do it without even thinking about it. This leads to tension, usually on the top of the foot and toes and in the tibialis muscle but really has a whole-body effect. Instead of regular flip flops, opt for ones with a strap that goes around the back or straps that go over the top of the foot, to keep the shoe on your foot without you doing anything extra to keep it there. You can even fashion your own strap and add it to your flip-flops.
The 4 important components of a shoe that would help the foot and body…
The review, the 4 important components of a shoe that would help the foot and body be in a more natural alignment are a zero drop heel, a wide toe box, a flexible sole, and it stays on your foot. Wearing shoes for decades that have a heel, are stiff and rigid, have a narrow toe box and that doesn’t stay on your feet can lead to a number of foot and whole body issues: plantar fasciitis, bunions, Morton’s neuroma, flat feet, ankle schmear, knee issues, hip issues, pelvic floor issues, lower back, neck, and more… And check out AnyasReviews Ultimate Guide to Barefoot and Minimalist Shoes & FAQs. Lots more info here on shoes, feet, alignment, etc.
Getting regular bodywork can really help in this process.
Personally, I had some nerve damage in one of my feet and was also dealing with a pelvic floor issue. I learned that my shoes and the way my body had adapted to wearing shoes could be part of what created the problem. I changed my shoes and now I can’t go back to wearing any old shoes. My feet and body are no longer like heels, being squished together or being unable to feel the terrain below me. There are over 200,000 nerve endings in our feet and this is so we CAN feel the terrain below us, They send signals to the brain to position our body in certain ways so we don’t fall. Wearing thick shoes cuts off this communication to your brain. I have to say that I still continue, after years of wearing minimal shoes, to do corrective exercises for my feet and whole body. So it’s an ongoing thing. Getting regular bodywork can really help in this process.
Hope this was helpful! Please let me know if you have questions about feet at your next session. I’d be happy to share what I know! Just 10 minutes from Canby, Oregon in historical downtown Aurora is where my office is located. You can book a massage, myofascial, cupping, hot stone, or craniosacral therapy treatment here! Yarrow and You Therapeutic Bodywork